The ad is for the Senator John Heinz History Center and it ran through ‘07. It got an award for cultural awareness at the ADDYs last month.

Photo: Sonny Tumbelka/AFP/Getty Images

Police keep watch as Papuanese protesters shout slogans against U.S. mining giant Freeport during a demonstration in Denpasar on Bali island.

I am about to crack open Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

The premise…

A revelatory examination of how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill.

With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s a clip from the author, Clay Shirky where he quips…

Standing from today, looking to the future… you will make more accurate predictions… by asking…
Not what’s the business model but rather… do the people that like it take care of each other?
…that turns out to be the better predictor of longevity.

reposted from stuff white people do

impose their beauty standards on others
Try this thought experiment sometime. Say the following to an American:

I’m going to say a phrase, but before I do so, you have to close your eyes, and clear your mind.

Then I’m going to ask you what picture popped into your head in response to the phrase.

Okay, got your eyes closed? Good.

Got your mind as empty as you can get it? Good.

Now here’s the phrase: “All-American girl.”

Okay. Now describe the girl who came to mind for you–what does she look like?

In my experience, the vast majority of respondents say things like “cheerleader,” or “she has long hair.” Then, usually, “blond” and “blue eyes.” If the respondents are non-white, they tend to quickly use the word “white” to describe the girl who popped into their minds. If they’re white, it usually takes them longer to say the word “white,” but it almost always comes for them too.

What this experiment demonstrates is that the category of “All-American,” the category of American “ordinary,” is occupied by white people in the minds of almost all Americans, be they white or not.

The occupancy of whiteness on America’s cultural center stage has widespread effects throughout nearly every element of American culture, as well as within nearly every American mind. One sad effect is the favoring of white beauty standards, even among non-white people.

A lot of Asian women, for instance, have eye operations to widen their eyes. They do so for various reasons, but a common one, sometimes conscious and sometimes subconscious, is to make their eyes less “narrow.” Narrow compared to what? one might ask. How did other, wider, non-Asian eyes come to be a standard for beauty that made Asian eyes seem not normal, but narrow in comparison?

Similarly, black women straighten their hair and use skin lighteners. They do so for various reasons, but an often subconscious reason is to make their appearance more like that of white women.

Women of color can now win local, national, and international beauty contests that are not in some way specific to particular races and ethnicities. But they can only do so if their appearances match a set of criteria initially established by previous white winners, and by a broader social and cultural emphasis on the beauty of white women. This set of criteria also holds true, in most cases, for the talent portions of such contests, and any demonstrations of markedly non-white talent only win if they are toned down, smoothed out, made palatable, or “decent”–and thus in effect, “whitened” as well.

A brilliant high school student named Kiri Davis recently made a poignant, informative, seven-minute analysis of this problem, demonstrating some of the insidious effects of the imposition of white standards on non-white people:

Photo: Leon Neal / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Pupils study as United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visits their classroom in Manegda, Burkina Faso.

Photo: Dani Cardona/REUTERS

A Saharawi woman is seen at a refugee camp near Tindouf in southwestern Algeria.

Brewing A More Perfect Nation

13-minute mashup of Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” and Miles Davis’ “Feio” from the Bitches Brew sessions. This mashup tries to present Barack’s speech in a more digestible form. As powerful as the speech is, it’s hard to digest all 37 minutes of it. So it’s been cut it down to these five chunks.

Jay Smooth calls out hip hop heads who are worried that Ashely Dupre, the sex trade worker caught up with Eliot Spitzer’s scandal, will devalue hip hop if she records an album.

Photo: Serkan Senturk/AP

A Turkish Kurd gestures as he stands in front of a bonfire during a gathering to mark the spring festival of Nowruz in Istanbul.

Photo: Mariana Vasoncellos/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walks past an image projection on Jerusalem’s old city walls ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover being celebrated on April 22 to 24th.